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Re: German POWs Worked County Farms

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: February 03, 2003

"German POWs worked county farms in '40s

by Sean Sedam Staff Writer

Brian Lewis/The Gazette

Billy King sits on a stone gate at Johnson's Local Park on Washington Grove Lane. The gate, built by German prisoners of war, marks the place where a camp for 200 prisoners was located during World War II.
The letters are typed or written in careful script.

They speak of a 40-year friendship formed during World War II, by the unlikeliest of friends: Harold Hargett, a Germantown farmer and roofer, and Josef Taglang, a German prisoner of war.

Sixty years later, with the United States on the brink of war in the Middle East and al Qaeda prisoners of war detained in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it seems hard to believe that captured Axis soldiers were held in Gaithersburg during World War II.

But in September 1942, Maryland's Fort Meade held more than 2,000 prisoners of war, according to an article written by Patricia Abelard Andersen for the Montgomery County Historical Society.

Under pressure from farmers and manufacturers, the War Department eventually placed these prisoners in work camps established throughout Maryland in the summers from 1943 to 1945.

One of the eight branch camps, the only camp in Montgomery County, consisted of tents erected in Emory Grove, on the site of what is now the Emory Grove Center -- formerly Longview School -- on Washington Grove Lane.

The prisoners built a stone gate at the entrance of the camp, according to local historians. That same gate still stands at the entrance to Johnson's Local Park on Washington Grove Lane.

During World War II the site was part of W.R. Winslow's farm, according to Andersen's history of the camp. Known as Camp No. 8, the tents housed 200 prisoners who were overseen by two officers and 26 enlisted men.

Farmers came from around the county, each picking up two or three prisoners each day -- the maximum number allowed to each farm -- and returning them each evening.

Sowing the seeds
of friendship

Harold Hargett and his brother Wesley befriended two prisoners who frequently worked their respective farms.

The Hargetts called the prisoners by their last names -- Taglang and Seib and would often get the men to cut and shuck corn and wheat.

"Tanglang and Seib were good workers," Harold Hargett said.

Others were not so good. "We had some who were excellent at skipping time," he said.

Wesley Hargett, who died in 1997, remembered the two men during an interview with Germantown resident Susan Soderberg in her book "A History of Germantown, Maryland."

"[Seib] could speak and write English," Wesley Hargett said in that interview. "He had been a long-distance runner in the Olympics and he had a little store back in Germany. [Taglang] could speak a little English. His father was the mayor of a little town near Munich."

Harold Hargett, who turned 37 in 1943, was partial to Taglang, who he said spoke enough English to get by.

"He understood it like we understood German," said Hargett, now 97. "We made do anyway."

'Somebody's kids'

The prisoners never tried to escape or do any damage to the American farms, Hargett said.

Neighbors joked that it was because of the Hargetts' large white Pyrenees dog, which would watch over the workers.

"People would come by and say, 'You've got this great big white dog there to guard these prisoners,'" Harold Hargett said. "That wasn't so, but if they thought it, all right."

Most of the prisoners seemed glad to be working on the farms and were respectful of the farmers, said Hargett, who still has a home on his farm off Shiloh Church Road in Boyds, but has spent the last six months at the Montgomery Village Care and Rehabilitation Center recuperating from a fall.

His memory has faded, but he remembers thinking at the time that the prisoners must have been lower class officers in the German army.

"The ones that came over here, they were a different breed of pups, you might say," he said.

Billy King remembers the German prisoners of war who worked on his family's farm as young men not unlike himself.

"They were nice boys," King recalled during a recent interview from his home in the Rosemont neighborhood of Gaithersburg. "They were just somebody's kids."

Food for friendship

At the King farm, which today is a mix of homes, shopping and offices near where Shady Grove Road divides Rockville and Gaithersburg, Billy King's father, William Lawson King would bring the prisoners in on his truck.

They would work as day laborers on whatever needed done around the farm, where there was never a shortage of work.

"When you're filling silos, you're always short of help," said Billy King, 81.

Some of the prisoners refused to work and the farmers would try not to get them again, he recalled.

"Others tried to work for us because they knew we would give them something to eat and treat them well," he said. "Because some of the farmers didn't do that."

The prisoners were given sandwiches upon leaving the camp each morning.

"They grabbed a bucket and brought them along just like you'd do if you were going off to school," Hargett said. "They weren't looked on as being dangerous. They'd just come out and we'd pick them up just like a neighbor."

Elizabeth Banks, 90, remembers the prisoners sitting down to eat under the trees on the farm her father, Roland Banks, owned on Darnestown Road, where she still lives. The prisoners were not allowed to talk to women and the farmers were not supposed to feed the prisoners.

But the farmers and their wives often broke that rule. Roger Burdette, 74, remembers his mother fixing lunch for the prisoners. His father, Paul Burdette, poured them milk from 10 gallon cans on the back of a truck he drove around the Germantown farm where Roger Burdette still lives.

It was a simple compromise.

"Feed them and they'll work for you," King said. "If you didn't, they won't."

Farmers knew feeding the prisoners was against the rules.

"But that was something you might do," Hargett said. "You'd form a friendship base out of it you might say."

Letters and photographs

That friendship is captured in a photo Hargett took of his friends on their last day before they left the Gaithersburg camp.

That was the last time Hargett would see Taglang for almost 40 years. In the interim the two would send letters to each other every year or so.

A letter from 1969 shows how throughout his life Taglang carried memories of the many farm families he met while a prisoner and farmhand in Montgomery County.

He wrote: "How is William by doctor Norse, the farmers King? How is Mrs. Haid? Can you say her a great of me? Also I want to say a great to the family Williams and the brothers King."

Taglang and Hargett were reunited briefly in 1983 on the last day of a tour of Europe that Hargett took with his niece Aileen Ferguson, who lives with her husband Jack on the farm Harold Hargett once ran, and family friend Kathryn Size, a Germantown resident.

The old friends sat and visited. Taglang did not speak much English. A housekeeper translated.

It was the last time the two men spoke. Hargett said he stopped writing after that. A few years later the housekeeper wrote to tell Hargett his friend had died.

Prisoners of circumstance

The prisoners who worked the fields of Montgomery County provided welcome help to farmers, who, as in any other industry, suffered from a shortage of manpower during the war.

"Everybody that was able at all was in the Army," Burdette said.

Farm workers were exempt from military service, but the draft made it difficult to find seasonal help.

While some farmers might have looked on the German prisoners as a wartime enemy, "most of them thought of them as good workers," Hargett said. "And we needed good workers at the time, so they weren't looked down on as enemies."

As a young man in his early 20s, King saw the German prisoners as peers, even if they had been enemy soldiers.

"I always figured they were somebody's boys that were here and we were treating them that way," he said.

Burdette was a bit younger than the prisoners were, but even at 14 saw them in a similar light.

"They were just like our boys," he said. "They were in there because they had to be in there to fight a war."

© 2003 The Gazette"